The 2022-2023 colloquium series concludes on Monday, April 10, with a talk by Laura Kalin (Princeton), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom from 3:10-5pm. Her talk is entitled "On the nature of linearization: Insights from infixes and infixation," and the abstract is as follows:
How do abstract syntactic structures come to have a linear order? It is widely assumed in the generative literature that linearization follows the syntax (see, e.g., Chomsky 1995, Nunes 1999, 2004, Moro 2000, Berwick & Chomsky 2011). But, there is no consensus on the precise timing and nature of post-syntactic linearization, with proposals split along the following lines (among many others): (i) is linearization determined entirely by structural relationships?; (ii) does linearization within a word obey the same principles as linearization across words?; and (iii) does linearization of an affixal morpheme with respect to its stem take place prior to or simultaneous with (i.e., as part of) exponence? For some varying proposals, see e.g. Lieber 1992, Noyer 1992, Embick 2010, Arregi and Nevins 2012, Bye and Svenonius 2012, Idsardi and Raimy 2013, Myler 2017, Georgieva et al 2021, Felice 2022, Hewett 2022.
In this talk, I use infixes and infixation as a window into linearization and the post-syntactic component. In very brief, what I will propose is that basic linear order (for all morphemes) is established cyclically, from the bottom of a spelled-out structure upward, interspersed with exponence; at each terminal, linearization properly precedes exponence, and can be influenced by various non-structural factors. In addition, I will argue for one point of re-linearization which is also cyclic, but which takes place after exponent choice. The evidence will include and go beyond the type of case study considered in Kalin 2022.